Two stories today made me laugh about how 20th century structures are irrelevant to modern technology. The first was about taxis:
London’s taxis are planning a 10,000-cab protest next month, as professional drivers across Europe demonstrate growing opposition to Uber Technologies Inc.’s app.
…
The controversial app, which helps private drivers and professionals charge for rides, has met with protests in several markets from the taxi industry, whose drivers often pay steep fees for licenses and permits and complain that San Francisco-based Uber’s cars are given an unfair advantage.
…
Uber markets itself as a way for drivers to start their own businesses, showing profiles of top drivers on its website who include a student who used the app to make money on weekends, a single mother who started her own business and a man who quit his job to drive passengers around San Francisco. That means it can draw drivers from outside of the professional chauffeuring industry who may hold different licenses or qualifications. That’s a key difference from similar apps like Hailo, which recruit taxi drivers.Cars in Brussels that use the app will be subject to a 10,000-euro ($13,863) fine after a local court ruled against Uber cars last month. European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes called the ban “crazy” and anti-competitive.
In Berlin, the taxi association said that Uber hurt competition by violating rules that force limousine drivers to return to a base after delivering customers. In April, a court banned taxi services that use the app, though the injunction wasn’t enforced at the time.
Microjobs are coming. Deal with it. The second example was about guns:
Yoshitomo Imura, a 27-year-old Japanese man, has been arrested for allegedly possessing a collection of guns made with a 3D printer, according to The Japan Times.
Police say that two of the five recovered handguns are capable of firing, though no bullets were discovered at the man’s home in Kawasaki, south of Tokyo.
Imura, an employee of Shonan Institute of Technology in Fujisawa, is reported to have made the weapons using a commercial 3D printer he bought online for 60,000 yen (£349/$590) in conjunction with plans he downloaded from file-sharing sites.
Decentralized manufacturing is also coming. Deal with that, too.
Ian Lee provides us with a good reason to avoid Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business. His contribution to the so-called debate over voter ID and vouching may be summed up as:
This empirical research reveals that multiple federal and provincial government agencies are required by law to record and often monitor citizens in multiple overlapping digital identification databases – with identity cards numbering well in excess of 200 million for 18 million voters (excluding millions of monthly utility bills) – from health care cards to driver’s licenses to student ID cards to employee cards to birth certificates to passports to SIN cards to auto ownership cards to library cards to debit cards to credit cards to Aboriginal ID cards to title deeds to tenancy agreements.
His argument is that since 200-million cards have been issued – not all of which are valid identification under the current act, but never mind that – for 18-million voters, therefore every voter actually possesses valid ID. To my relief, he’s being ripped apart in the comments, showing that not all Canadians are completely incapable of formulating an actual argument.
I don’t have any opinion on voter ID, by the way. I have very little interest in the topic anyway, and when I do stumble across some reference to the so-called debate, it’s all pure garbage such as Ian Lee’s article.
Speaking of incompetent educators:
The Alberta task force noted that in 10 years, not one teacher has lost his or her job because of ineffectiveness – this, in a province that employs 35,000 full-time K-12 educators. That is a mind-boggling statistic and an indictment of both the government and the union. It’s not much different in most Canadian provinces. In British Columbia, just 16 teachers have been terminated or resigned in the past decade over incompetence-related issues. The province employs more than 30,000 K-12 teachers.
Talk to any teacher and they’ll identify at least one or two colleagues who shouldn’t be instructing kids for a living. That shouldn’t come as a great surprise. The teaching profession isn’t immune from the basic rules of the working world; 5 to 10 per cent of those making up any work force should probably be doing something else for a living. In the private sector, it’s much easier to push these people out the door and toward another direction. (And often, the departed are later happy they did.) In a unionized environment, where the mandate is frequently to protect the status quo, it’s much more difficult.
David Parkinson in the Globe comments on Canada’s bleak employment situation:
But the fact is that jobs have now declined in three of the past five months – during which time the Canadian labour market has actually lost nearly 8,000 jobs. If anything looks like a statistical outlier here, is was the big March gain, not the April fall.
Consider other disturbing details in the April report. All the job losses were concentrated in full-time positions (indeed, at 31,000, it was more than all of them, offset by a 2,000 job gain in part-time employment). The private sector shed 29,000 jobs while governments shed another 17,000; the only thing propping the job count from an even worse fate was a 17,000-job increase in self-employment, a dubious sign for job quality.
Gee, I wonder what could be driving this. Could it be idiotic energy policies?
“I doubt we’ll add any more plants in Canada,” Magna chief executive officer Don Walker told shareholders Thursday at the company’s annual meeting in Toronto.
The auto parts giant is competitive in Canada, invests about $150-million (U.S.) annually in its existing plants here and has benefited from the recent drop in the value of the Canadian dollar, Mr. Walker noted.
He is worried, however, about the level of vehicle production in Canada, rising electricity costs in Ontario and high transportation costs.
In the last Ontario election, two of the three main candidates knocked on my door personally; I told them both that nobody had my support because not one of the three parties had an electricity policy that made the slightest bit of sense at all. Looks like I’ll be saying the same thing this time ’round; actually, it may be worse because the opposition parties are blathering about a paltry $1-billion gas plant cancellation, which is basically a rounding error:
Solar energy – one of the key pillars of the Green Energy and Economy Act (GEEA) – is casting a dark cloud over Ontario electricity bills and is a big factor in recent and future bill increases. In 2013, solar projects caused electricity bills to be about $550-million higher than they would otherwise have been. For a typical homeowner, this works out to $47 per year. Ontario will have an estimated 1,100 MW of solar installed by year-end and roughly 900 MW will be added in 2014. This addition will cause 2014 electricity bills to increase by another $435-million – equal to a typical homeowner increase of $37 per year. By the end of 2014, solar will be costing Ontarians $1.25-billion per year – while generating a paltry 2% of Ontario’s total electricity requirement.
The TSX is rolling out a new system:
And as with many upgrades in trading technology, there is a debate. There is the usual grousing from Bay Street about the costs to connect to a new system, which requires testing and upgrades by users.
But the bigger question is, who will benefit?
TMX says everybody will, because the market will be faster, spreads will be tighter and speeds will be more consistent.
…
However, critics say that the real beneficiaries will be high frequency traders. That’s because some work that used to be done in the TMX trading engine will now have to be done by users.
The anonymous critics are missing a trick there. According to the Exchange:
Who will be impacted by the TMX Quantum XA upgrade? Anyone with a direct
connection to TSX, TSX Venture, or TMX Select with a certified order entry
application will be impacted and required to make changes as a result of the TMX
Quantum XA upgrade. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Service Bureau vendors
- Participating Organizations, Members, or Subscribers with in-house proprietary systems
- Software providers
- DMA customers supporting direct connections
So in other words, barriers to entry are increasing. So, in other words, a big beneficiary of the change will be the big banks. Who also own the Exchange. The changes, in total, may be good; they may be bad; as is usual in Canada, there is no informed debate either way; in large part because associate professors at business schools in Ottawa get more mileage out of spouting utter nonsense to further their political ambitions than in actually analyzing business. But there’s certainly no surprise that one division of the Big Banks is making system changes that will favour other divisions of the Big Banks.
I stumbled across a listing of nascent technologies:
7. Paper-Thin, Flexible Computers and Phones
How would you feel if your smartphone or tablet was as thin as paper and capable of exhibiting the same level of flexibility? Would feel pretty awesome, no? The future has such gadgets for you in store. As of now projects are underway to come up with smartphones and tablets, which will be fully functional yet look just like paper. Papertab was showed in CES 2013 and a collaborative effort is being made by two Canadian and American universities and the project is being called; ‘Paperphone’. Dr. Roel Vertegaal from Queens University says; ‘This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years.
Now, this would be useful. Before I buy my first e-Book, or give up on my printed newspaper subscriptions, I want a device that will
i) allow me to read normally
ii) fit in my pocket
There’s a two year old status report available, but there’s a recent newspaper article:
The Human Media Lab is unveiling its revolutionary foldable smartphone technology “Paperfold” in Toronto today at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Queen’s professor Roel Vertegaal and student Antonio Gomes will be demonstrating the smartphone’s ability to fold open up to three flexible displays that allows extra screen space when needed. The three detachable electrophoretic displays allow the compact phone to be connected into a variety of arrangements that can mimic both a notebook computer format or a foldout map.
I’m not too enthusiastic about the 3-D remodelling; but if something like this can be produced for $500, I’m all for it!
The rally in the Canadian preferred share market paused today, with PerpetualDiscounts and DeemedRetractibles both off 6bp, while FixedResets gained 4bp. Hmmm … let’s see … down a bit after a rally … on a Friday … Profit taking! Must be profit taking! That will be $1,000, please. Volatility was muted. Volume was low.
And now it’s time for PrefLetter!
| HIMIPref™ Preferred Indices These values reflect the December 2008 revision of the HIMIPref™ Indices Values are provisional and are finalized monthly |
|||||||
| Index | Mean Current Yield (at bid) |
Median YTW |
Median Average Trading Value |
Median Mod Dur (YTW) |
Issues | Day’s Perf. | Index Value |
| Ratchet | 0.00 % | 0.00 % | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 0.1416 % | 2,456.4 |
| FixedFloater | 4.58 % | 3.81 % | 32,361 | 17.82 | 1 | -1.8440 % | 3,752.2 |
| Floater | 2.97 % | 3.09 % | 52,568 | 19.47 | 4 | 0.1416 % | 2,652.2 |
| OpRet | 4.36 % | -5.35 % | 34,006 | 0.15 | 2 | 0.3794 % | 2,710.2 |
| SplitShare | 4.78 % | 4.06 % | 66,274 | 4.18 | 5 | 0.1502 % | 3,107.2 |
| Interest-Bearing | 0.00 % | 0.00 % | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 0.3794 % | 2,478.2 |
| Perpetual-Premium | 5.50 % | -11.01 % | 96,991 | 0.09 | 15 | 0.0287 % | 2,403.7 |
| Perpetual-Discount | 5.28 % | 5.30 % | 121,023 | 14.93 | 21 | -0.0564 % | 2,549.0 |
| FixedReset | 4.50 % | 3.33 % | 208,346 | 4.28 | 75 | 0.0368 % | 2,573.8 |
| Deemed-Retractible | 4.97 % | -6.98 % | 142,717 | 0.13 | 42 | -0.0631 % | 2,531.2 |
| FloatingReset | 2.65 % | 2.30 % | 179,682 | 4.06 | 6 | 0.0527 % | 2,496.5 |
| Performance Highlights | |||
| Issue | Index | Change | Notes |
| BAM.PR.G | FixedFloater | -1.84 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2044-05-09 Maturity Price : 21.46 Evaluated at bid price : 20.76 Bid-YTW : 3.81 % |
| PWF.PR.P | FixedReset | 1.02 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2044-05-09 Maturity Price : 23.55 Evaluated at bid price : 24.72 Bid-YTW : 3.30 % |
| MFC.PR.F | FixedReset | 1.97 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2025-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 24.21 Bid-YTW : 3.60 % |
| Volume Highlights | |||
| Issue | Index | Shares Traded |
Notes |
| MFC.PR.A | OpRet | 229,545 | RBC crossed 223,000 at 25.50. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2014-06-19 Maturity Price : 25.25 Evaluated at bid price : 25.55 Bid-YTW : -10.25 % |
| FTS.PR.G | FixedReset | 57,121 | RBC crossed 28,200 at 25.30. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2044-05-09 Maturity Price : 23.27 Evaluated at bid price : 25.16 Bid-YTW : 3.68 % |
| ENB.PR.B | FixedReset | 50,975 | Scotia crossed 40,000 at 25.30. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2044-05-09 Maturity Price : 23.46 Evaluated at bid price : 25.25 Bid-YTW : 3.92 % |
| BNS.PR.Z | FixedReset | 28,765 | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 24.74 Bid-YTW : 3.33 % |
| GWO.PR.H | Deemed-Retractible | 23,121 | TD crossed 15,000 at 24.05. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2025-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 23.95 Bid-YTW : 5.47 % |
| BAM.PF.E | FixedReset | 22,488 | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2044-05-09 Maturity Price : 23.18 Evaluated at bid price : 25.20 Bid-YTW : 4.14 % |
| There were 20 other index-included issues trading in excess of 10,000 shares. | |||
| Wide Spread Highlights | ||
| Issue | Index | Quote Data and Yield Notes |
| GWO.PR.L | Deemed-Retractible | Quote: 26.05 – 26.34 Spot Rate : 0.2900 Average : 0.1878 YTW SCENARIO |
| CIU.PR.C | FixedReset | Quote: 21.40 – 21.98 Spot Rate : 0.5800 Average : 0.4931 YTW SCENARIO |
| CU.PR.E | Perpetual-Discount | Quote: 24.15 – 24.45 Spot Rate : 0.3000 Average : 0.2198 YTW SCENARIO |
| SLF.PR.A | Deemed-Retractible | Quote: 23.73 – 23.96 Spot Rate : 0.2300 Average : 0.1663 YTW SCENARIO |
| MFC.PR.B | Deemed-Retractible | Quote: 22.96 – 23.20 Spot Rate : 0.2400 Average : 0.1792 YTW SCENARIO |
| BMO.PR.M | FixedReset | Quote: 25.30 – 25.50 Spot Rate : 0.2000 Average : 0.1403 YTW SCENARIO |